The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World

Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “The Simulation Heuristic.” In Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, edited by Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, 3–22. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

LeCompte, Tom. “The Disorient Express.” Air & Space, September 2008, 38–43. http://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/the-disorient-express-474780/.

Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice.” Science 211, no. 4481 (1981): 453–58.





CHAPTER 12: THIS CLOUD OF POSSIBILITY


Cohen, L. Jonathan. “On the Psychology of Prediction: Whose Is the Fallacy?” Cognition 7, no. 4 (1979): 385–407.

——— . “Can Human Irrationality Be Experimentally Demonstrated?” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4, no. 3 (1981): 317–31. Followed by thirty-nine pages of letters, including Persi Diaconis and David Freedman, “The Persistence of Cognitive Illusions: A Rejoinder to L. J. Cohen,” 333–34, and a response by Cohen, 331–70.

——— . Knowledge and Language: Selected Essays of L. Jonathan Cohen, edited by James Logue. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2002.

Gigerenzer, Gerd. “How to Make Cognitive Illusions Disappear: Beyond ‘Heuristics and Biases.’” In European Review of Social Psychology, Vol. 2, edited by Wolfgang Stroebe and Miles Hewstone, 83–115. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 1991.

——— . “On Cognitive Illusions and Rationality.” In Probability and Rationality: Studies on L. Jonathan Cohen’s Philosophy of Science, edited by Ellery Eells and Tomasz Maruszewski, 225–49. Poznan′ Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, Vol. 21. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991.

——— . “The Bounded Rationality of Probabilistic Mental Models.” In Rationality: Psychological and Philosophical Perspectives, edited by Ken Manktelow and David Over, 284–313. London: Routledge, 1993.

——— . “Why the Distinction between Single-Event Probabilities and Frequencies Is Important for Psychology (and Vice Versa).” In Subjective Probability, ed. George Wright and Peter Ayton, 129–61. Chichester, UK: Wiley, 1994.

——— . “On Narrow Norms and Vague Heuristics: A Reply to Kahneman and Tversky.” Psychological Review 103 (1996): 592–96.

——— . “Ecological Intelligence: An Adaptation for Frequencies.” In The Evolution of Mind, edited by Denise Dellarosa Cummins and Colin Allen, 9–29. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. “Discussion: On the Interpretation of Intuitive Probability: A Reply to Jonathan Cohen.” Cognition 7, no. 4 (1979): 409–11.

Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “Extensional versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment.” Psychological Review 90, no. 4 (1983): 293–315.

——— . “Advances in Prospect Theory.” Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 5 (1992): 297–323. http://psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/psych466/articles/tversky_kahneman_jru_92.pdf.

Vranas, Peter B. M. “Gigerenzer’s Normative Critique of Kahneman and Tversky.” Cognition 76 (2000): 179–93.

CODA: BORA-BORA

Redelmeier, Donald A., and Robert J. Tibshirani. “Association between Cellular-Telephone Calls and Motor Vehicle Collisions.” New England Journal of Medicine 336 (1997): 453–58. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199702133360701#t=article.

Thaler, Richard. “Toward a Positive Theory of Consumer Choice.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization l (1980): 39–60. http://www.eief.it/butler/files/2009/11/thaler80.pdf.

GENERAL

Kazdin, Alan E., ed. Encyclopedia of Psychology. 8 vols. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Murchison, Carl, Gardner Lindzey, et al., eds. A History of Psychology in Autobiography. Vols. I–IX. Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, and Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1930–2007.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I never know exactly who to thank, or whether to say “whom” to thank. The problem is not a deficit of gratitude but a surplus of debt. I owe so many people that I don’t know where to start. But there are people without whom this book simply would not have come to pass, and I’ll focus on them.

Danny Kahneman and Barbara Tversky, for starters. When I met Danny, in late 2007, I had no ambition to write a book about him. Once I acquired that ambition, I spent roughly five years making him comfortable with it. Even then he remained, um, circumspect. “I don’t think it is possible to describe the two of us without simplifying, without making us too large, and without exaggerating the differences between our characters,” he once said. “That’s the nature of the task, and I am curious to see how you will deal with it—though not curious enough to want to read it early.” Barbara was a different story. Back in the late 1990s, by bizarre coincidence, I taught, or attempted to teach, her son Oren. As I was unaware of the existence of Amos Tversky, I was unaware that he was Amos Tversky’s son. Anyway, I went to Barbara bearing a character reference from my former pupil. Barbara gave me access to Amos’s papers, and her guidance. Amos’s children, Oren, Tal, and Dona, offered a view of Amos that I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else. I remain deeply grateful to the Tversky family.

I came to this story as I’ve come to a lot of stories, as an interloper. Without Maya Bar-Hillel and Daniela Gordon, I would have been lost in Israel. In Israel, over and over again, I had the feeling that the people I was interviewing were not only more interesting than I was but also more capable of explaining what needed to be explained. That this story did not require a writer as much as it did a stenographer. I want to thank several Israelis, in particular, for allowing me to take dictation: Verred Ozer, Avishai Margalit, Varda Liberman, Reuven Gal, Ruma Falk, Ruth Bayit, Eytan and Ruth Sheshinski, Amira and Yeshu Kolodny, Gershon Ben-Shakhar, Samuel Sattath, Ditsa Pines, and Zur Shapira.

In psychology I was not much more naturally at home than I was in Israel. I needed my guides there, too. For their services in this capacity I’d like to thank Dacher Keltner, Eldar Shafir, and Michael Norton. Many former students and colleagues of Amos and Danny’s were both generous with their time and full of insight. I’m especially grateful to Paul Slovic, Rich Gonzalez, Craig Fox, Dale Griffin, and Dale Miller. Steve Glickman offered a lovely guided tour of the history of psychology. And I’m not quite sure what I would have done if Miles Shore had not existed, or had not thought to interview Danny and Amos back in 1983. Miles Shore would be painful to undo.

One way to think of a book is as a series of decisions. I want to thank the people who helped me to make them in this one. Tabitha Soren, Tom Penn, Doug Stumpf, Jacob Weisberg, and Zoe Oliver-Grey read drafts of the manuscript and offered loving advice. Janet Byrne, who will one day be understood as having turned copyediting into an art form, fixed the book so that it was fit for consumption. Without the pushing and prodding of my editor, Starling Lawrence, I wouldn’t have bothered to write it in the first place, and if I had, I certainly wouldn’t have worked as hard at it as I wound up working. Finally, the possibility that this might be the last book that I ever give Bill Rusin to sell got my rear end in the desk chair sooner than I otherwise would have, so that he might work his magic. But not for the last time, I hope.

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